Video game content is coming of age.
Not video games themselves, those are doing just fine and have been for some time. The video game market pulled in around $56 billion in the U.S. in 2022, which is roughly eight times what was made at the U.S. box office. That's a lot of money and a lot of gamers with money to spend, so it makes sense that Hollywood is continuing to look toward the gaming industry for inspiration.
And they're getting good returns. The year's most talked about television show, HBO's "The Last of Us," elevated video game storytelling to prestige TV levels, and the series will likely be a big player at this year's Emmy Awards. An origin story about the making of the video game "Tetris," starring Academy Award nominee Taron Egerton, hit Apple TV+ last week. And "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," based on one of the most popular video game franchises of all-time, hits theaters this week and is expected to be a smash.
We've come a long way since the original "Super Mario Bros." became the first video game movie to hit the big screen. The live-action film, chronicling the adventures of the two plumbers from Brooklyn, was a notorious stinker and accounts for the subsequent drought in big screen "Super Mario" content.
But the rocky journey from then to now illustrates how Hollywood went from having no clue how to bring a video game to the screen to now bringing viewers to tears with gaming content, as was the case for many with "The Last of Us."
To understand how we arrived here, we have to jump back to May 1993, when Janet Jackson was at the top of the music charts with her slinky, laid back "That's the Way Love Goes," "Roseanne" and "Home Improvement" were prime-time hits on television and "Super Mario Bros." had every Nintendo Power reader stoked to go to the movies to see their small screen heroes turned big.
Movies had been made into video games before — there was "E.T." for the Atari 2600, and hit movies like "Top Gun" and "Friday the 13th" were transformed into unplayable games for the Nintendo Entertainment System — but the pipeline hadn't been reversed. "Super Mario Bros." would ultimately show why.
Starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the Mario brothers — Mario is their last name, see, making them Mario Mario and Luigi Mario, one of the movie's few successful jokes — "Super Mario Bros." follows a completely bungled plotline about an inter-dimensional portal, underworld politics (Dennis Hopper plays a greedy politician trying to take over the world) and the power of mushroom fungus. Outside of the characters themselves and a few in-game references, the movie has nothing to do with the "Super Mario Bros." game or how it feels to play it. Mario and Luigi don't even suit up in their iconic red and green overalls until more than an hour into the movie.
Released in theaters over Memorial Day weekend, "Super Mario Bros." opened to dismal reviews — The Detroit News' Susan Stark called it "far too stimulating for young children, far too primitively cartoonish for teens, far too noisy and chaotic for humankind in general" — and it debuted at No. 4 at the box office, behind Sly Stallone's "Cliffhanger," Ted Danson and Whoopi Goldberg's "Made in America" and the presidential comedy "Dave," which was in its fourth week of release. It went on to gross just $20 million at the North American box office, and was outperformed by that year's "Coneheads," the movie based on the "SNL" sketch. (In defense of "Coneheads," it had a better soundtrack.)
In later years, Hoskins would call the entire "Super Mario Bros." production "a nightmare," saying the movie ran over budget and over schedule, and he'd refer to husband and wife directing team Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel as "idiots." Today, the movie's not easy to find digitally — it's unavailable to stream or rent on any on demand services — but it's floating around online, and is at least worth a look as an object of curiosity (and to try to figure out why there's a joke centered around the square root of 26,481 that the movie can't even get right).
"Super Mario Bros." was probably doomed from the start, but its failure allowed critics to scoff at the mere idea of video games becoming fodder for movies. (Comic book movies, you'll recall, were once treated with similar derision.)
The following year, "Double Dragon" hit screens and fared even worse. Then came "Street Fighter" and a pair of "Mortal Kombat" movies, none of which removed the stigma from video game movies being better left as just video games.
A handful of box office successes arrived in the '00s — the "Tomb Raider" and "Resident Evil" films fared well financially — but video game movies were mostly critical duds through the '00s and '10s, as movies like "DOA: Dead or Alive," "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time," "Need for Speed" and "Assassin's Creed" missed their marks.
It wasn't until 2019 when the "Pokémon" movie "Detective Pikachu" arrived that filmmakers cracked the code on video game movies, by making them for kids. That's what worked for 2020's genuinely enjoyable, genuinely funny "Sonic the Hedgehog" (its 2022 follow-up was less successful), and "Sonic's" success seemingly paved the way for the animated "The Super Mario Bros. Movie," which arrived Wednesday and features the voices of Chris Pratt, Jack Black, Anya Taylor-Joy and more.
The new "Super Mario" sticks pretty closely to the video game's color palette and formula, which perhaps if the original movie had done it could have saved us all some grief. It's going for a different audience than "The Last of Us" or even "Tetris," but the disparity in those properties ("Tetris" is staged as a spy thriller) show that video game content is here to stay, and at long last, it's leveling up.
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